At 5.00 a.m. on 13 February 1692 the forces of William III – all of whom, under the false pretence of collecting taxes, had been billeted with the citizens of Glencoe, Scotland – rose against their MacDonald hosts to execute a ‘secret and sudden’ massacre. William III’s troops, acting upon the English monarch’s presumption of Scottish support for the exiled Stuart king James II, were instructed to ‘put all to the sword under seventy’, and after doing so they burned Glencoe’s villages to the ground. After the Massacre of Glencoe depicts the few survivors, climbing to safety into the breathtakingly beautiful hills above their torched homes.